Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

In recent years, the emerging field of museum studies has seen rapid expansion in the critical study of museums and scholars started to question the institution and its functions. To contribute differentiated viewpoints to the currently evolving meta-discourse on the museum, this volume aims to investigate how the institution of the museum has been visualized and translated into different kinds of images and how these images have affected our perception of these institutions. In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds, including art history, heritage, museums studies and architectural history, explore a broad range of case studies stretching across the globe. The volume opens up debate about the epistemological and historiographical significance of a variety of different images and representations of the Art Museum, including the transformation or adaptation of the image of the art museum across periods and cultures. In this context, this volume aims to develop a new theoretical framework while proposing new methodological tools and resources for the analysis of museological representations on a global scale.